The rules had changed since the Fall of Eluriand. Where the undead hordes there had sluggishly gone out of control when their masters fell or were incapacitated, the ones in Tembrethnil did not. If anything, about half of them seemed to become worse than before. They jolted upright, their movements turned quicker and more precise, and their eyes flashed with an awful sense of experience and skill. They didn't falter for a second as they rejoined the battle, and the Elves of Farstrike paid for it in blood.

A company of around thirty or so had been reduced to a little over ten now. Certainly no more than fifteen, and that was including the Seers and those wounded who were unable to fight on. Vara was nowhere to be seen, but neither was Passion Near, and explosions could be heard off in the distance and up in the skies as Seer fought succubus for life and pride and more still. On the ground, the surviving Rangers had clustered together in a melee of swinging staves and precisely aimed wands, and those few who'd lost one or the other had drawn short swords and resorted to more savage methods. They dared not go near the trees, animate monsters they'd become, and the undead hordes just kept coming.

A red sun rose, and it was going to be a good day to die.

Not far removed from where the surviving Rangers were fighting for their lives, Aldinar and Eledier waged a losing battle against the remaining Death Lord, Ghez Felhammer. Unlike so many such battles in the joint histories of Man and Elf, there was no convenient balancing act between them. Ghez was bigger, stronger, faster, better armed and better armored, with years of hard-fought experience and a natural talent for killing things in all sorts of barbaric ways. The only reasons the Elves weren't being hacked to bits at every turn were prescience and numbers -- and even that was tit-for-tat at best, since Eledier was slowing down due to her injuries and Ghez carried two axes for just such an occasion as this.

And Ghez was different from your stereotypical barbarian hero for other reasons as well. There was technique in his fighting style; thuggish and brutal, but elegant in its simplicity and cunning in its forethought. He didn't waste breath screaming out battlecries once the fighting began, and he didn't taunt or mock his enemies until they were good and disabled. The most he said, in fact, was the occasional, "I'm going to see you bound and in tears," to Eledier. Even this was spoken as an utterly casual aside to the fact that he'd been bashing her with the blunt head of his left axe.

Eledier went skidding back some yards, her chestplate thoroughly dented in the outline of the axe's topside. She collapsed to one knee, and Aldinar spared no time in putting himself between her and Felhammer. He landed with a twirling flourish of his spear, parrying aside one of Felhammer's axes and ducking the other. Aldinar shouted something in an old dialect of Raiaeran, pulling the spear back until he held it like a knife, then swept in low and delivered a stab to Felhammer's midsection.

It was the Death Lord who went skidding back this time, spinning the whole way so that his trail was like a series of interlocking olympic rings carved into the earth. He stopped a few dozen yards later, and though his placement had changed, his actual posture had done. It was like the planet had moved to accomodate him. The only change at all was the presence of a glassy looking patch of stone on his armor, teal-colored and covered in gold sigils and runes.

"You will die this day," Aldinar declared, even as he traced something like a lopsided Hail Mary in front of him.

The patch on Ghez's midsection exploded. The sound it made was like listening to a shockwave of pressure at extreme depths, and the look of it resembled a cloud of bubbles bursting underwater. The explosion warped into a tornado, and then collapsed in on itself with such force that the ground was butchered into an ugly crater at its center.

"Better than you have tried," Ghez informed him before the smoke could clear. The Death Lord lunged right out of the blast, virtually unscathed as he brought axes to bear in a double-thrust. Aldinar danced around the attack and immediately regretted it: Ghez turned the axeblades so that they faced to either side, then swung his arms back wide as he planted one foot in a hard landing.

His left axe sank inches deep in Aldinar's side. It plowed through Aldinar's armor like it wasn't even there, then sank between ribs and tore through part of his right lung.

"Huh," Felhammer sounded disinterestedly as he straightened up, holding his axe -- and Aldinar with it -- at arm's length. He didn't even turn to look back at where the Elf was standing, frozen in pain and shock. "I thought you would've dodged it."

Another explosion sounded in the distance, as the Rangers faltered. Three more of them dropped like flies before the rest could recover from the shock of seeing one of their leaders brought low with such ease.

"Oh well," Felhammer shrugged. Without even looking, he yanked his axe free with a spray of blood. Aldinar collapsed to one knee, but he did not scream. He didn't get up to miraculously save the day either.

Aldinar simply toppled over onto his side, shuddered once, and didn't move again.